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Two high school friends, now studying at two different campuses, reunited to collaborate on an initiative that has been awarded a $10,000 grant from Middlebury College.

Tiko Dolidze ’26, an economics and politics double major at ���챬��, and Mariam Beshidze ’27, an English and French double major at Amherst College, both attended in Tbilisi, Georgia.

Dolidze and Beshidze have collaborated on far-reaching projects before. As high school students during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, they organized more than 70 university students to volunteer as virtual peer tutors for 200 students from rural Georgia. Beshidze spearheaded a feminist empowerment program, managed by Dolidze, that allowed more than 50 young women in Georgia to attend workshops and meet women leaders.

Now, they have created the Agora Lab, an eight-week summer initiative that will train expatriate Georgian youth to ethically document and preserve firsthand testimonies from participants in the . The lab is partnering with researchers and experts from the and the at the Davis Center at Harvard University.

While Georgia has experienced waves of student-led protests — bringing change in 1978, 1989, 2007 and 2009 — only a handful of firsthand testimonies from those movements were preserved. The Agora Lab was created to prevent the protests of 2023 and 2025 from passing without documentation.

“We’ll work on these interviews, we’ll transcribe them and create oral history documents for future generations to use as a sort of democratic memory and a sign of democratic resilience,” Beshidze said.

“The protests are very special because [they were] self-organized; it was not sponsored by any party, and up to 100,000 people would come out to the streets every day and protest fraudulent elections and the backsliding of democracy,” said Dolidze.

Dolidze and Beshidze initially wanted to connect with people still in Georgia, but because of the country’s repressive laws, they shifted the project to focus on those who have emigrated.

“The Georgian community, and engaging with it, is very important for us,” said Dolidze. “We decided to create a project specifically for Georgian students in the U.S. We’re familiar with the diaspora leadership of Georgia.”

It was Dolidze who brought Projects for Peace to Beshidze’s attention. “She was the one [who] had the institutional support from Mount Holyoke and who had all the access to the information about Projects for Peace,” Beshidze said.

Briana Chace ’17, associate director of fellowships, was key to winning the grant. “Briana was amazing,” Dolidze said. “She’s been working with us so closely, and she organized the feedback from the advising committee for us, and she read through our proposal so many times! She’s given us emotional support as well.”

“I’m thrilled for Tiko and Mariam!” Chace said. “I shouted the good news to my office neighbors as soon as I saw the email come through. This is a bold and timely project about what it is to be civically engaged — that speaks to the current moment — and I can’t wait to see it come together this summer.”